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The Non-Evolution of God

By Nicholas Wade July 2, 2009 7:44 amJuly 2, 2009 7:44 am

Robert Wright’s new book, “The Evolution of God,” has a provocative title. But it’s a disappointment from the Darwinian perspective. He doesn’t mean real evolution, just the development of ideas about God.

He argues that our morality has improved over the centuries and that maybe the hand of the deity can be discerned in that progression, if one looks hard enough. But he leaves fuzzy the matter of whether he thinks a deity is there for real. There’s a moral order in history, he says, which “makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a ‘higher purpose.’” And maybe the source of that higher purpose, he writes, “is something that qualifies for the label ‘god’ in at least some sense of the word.”
This is not a terrible idea. Darwin himself had similar thoughts, but he later dropped the view that evolution had a higher moral purpose. New research on the biological roots of morality has drawn attention to another of Darwin’s ideas, that there is an innate disposition to moral behavior. Frans de Waal has described various pre-moral behaviors in monkey and ape societies. If a human moral instinct developed from these building blocks, then morality has a genetic basis and may well have evolved over the millennia into forms that are objectively higher.

Wright argues that the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam “reveal the arrow of moral development built into human history.” Though most historians disdain the idea of progress, there is good case for perceiving such an arrow. But the better evidence for this case comes from archaeology and anthropology, not the scriptures. And the explanation lies in the evolution of the moral instinct in ways which allowed gentler societies to prosper and ultimately prevail over more warlike ones.

Just because morality may have evolved in a direction we like to call progressive, that is no evidence of any higher purpose. Evolution has no purpose or goal – it’s one long improvisation. And it provides a simpler explanation for moral progression than the deity Wright half invokes.

Natural selection also explains rather well how religious behavior would have conferred such advantages on early human societies that it became a part of human nature (so I argue in a book, The Faith Instinct, due out in November). Wright’s position is that religion may have biological roots but was not shaped by natural selection – it’s just an accidental by-product of other features of the human mind, in his view. So the God of his title owes nothing to Darwin.

When can we, as human beings, agree to take responsibility for our own moral development?

Outsourcing responsibility for our moral behavior and development serves only to provide cover for the bad behavior that underpins the “ungentle” societies you mention. Selfishness, greed, hate, atrocities – we’re responsible. Thankfully we can also take credit for tolerance, kindness, compassion, generosity, and love.

Religion needs to evolve with us. I believe it’s instinctual, and therefore necessary. However, It seems outdated in its most popular forms. I’m curious to see what the future holds for it, and us. Your statement “Evolution has no purpose or goal” is perplexing. I understand that “purpose and goals” are just ideas that humans have. The universe doesnt know these ideas. I do think that the “purpose” is the action of evolving itself. There doesnt seem to be an end to it, but we can set a goal for ourselves. For instance, a higher state of conciousness or symbiosis with the environment. It may be that we are unable to know due to our current state in the process. We’re still cavemen.

God, or more correctly our perception of a diety or higher power has evolved over time, geography and ideology. One only has to see how different people evoke god’s words to justify their perfidy to see this.

Pascal lives. Even some of the most thoughtful and scientific among us cannot abandon faith when faced with the ultimate question. This is a failure of courage and a lack of belief in humanity, I think..

Wright’s claim of a possible existence for an outside force seems tacked on, to me. It doesn’t align with the rest of his thesis, which is the simple notion that humans designed a God imprinted with the morality of the current cultural milieu, and that imprint can be traced in its little-e evolution (the word predates Darwin’s idea of natural selection, you know) as cultures accumulate history and lessons learned.

The author of Nonzero, Wright is making a definite case for the same idea here; that there is cause for optimism. That that cause might be the First Cause? An accomodationist fig leaf rather like adding “Thank you, and God bless you” to the end of a speech, I think.

Perhaps not Darwin but it may make a case for Lamarckian evolution. While it was debunked at the DNA level there is a very good chance that it exists in the development of societies and all of their attributes, religion, business, family structure, etc.

Can we really say morality has evolved for the good. Sure, recently, we have held politicians to a higher standard of behavior, but we elected Bush -Cheney who we knew were operating at a very low standard. Before our Civil War conflict was usually between troops, but now whole populations are targets in every war.
If god favored morality why wait so long. Is god a procrastinator?

am two thirds of the way through wright’s book as i write. i must admit, i do like the way he parses the scriptures. after all the scriptures have to be considered as “textual archaeology.” they too represent events that occured over the past 3000 years.

the addition of game theory to his thesis makes great sense. of course philo of alexandria needed to look for allegory in old testament verses in order to appease caligula..

but i must agree that i find confusing his attempts to give natural selection a “direction.” i think he fundamentally misunderstands what natural selection is — how it works.

i do however, believe that at least some of human “morality” is due to cultural constraints. wright makes sense when he discusses how religions have served the needs of communities with taboos on stealing, adultery, etc.

it seems to me morality is a dance between genetic traits humanity acquired throughout our evolutionary history and cultural traits that develped as humans made the huge adaptation from small hunter-gatherer societies, up through tribes (a societal configuration he doesn’t address at all) up through large chiefdoms and eventually to the massive city states of old to the one-world situation we now have. different modes of behavior (morals) are needed for each societal configuration.

he would have been better off staying away from natural selection and making a case for the progression (evolution in loose terms) of human society as we all become entrenched in a non zero-sum game of globalization. cultural evolution is a different animal than natural selection.

and his argument that the cultural evolution of universal tolerance is somehow evidence of the divine is directly contradicted by his own summation throughout the book of cultural evolution being tied to “events on the ground” as empires grew and the realpolitik need for peace and tolerance of many different ethnic groups and their unique cultural practices was necessary for the empire to stay stable.

i am an archaeologist, wright does address clearly how parts of the old testament have been proven wrong by recent archaeological discoveries in the middle east. his synthesis of both archaeology and scripture in postulating that the nation of israel “evolved” from the ancient canaanite people is very good.

overall i am enjoying the book very much. my main “bone to pick’ is again, his attempt to portray cultural evolution as somehow linked to natural selection — and the idea that follows from that that biological evolution has some built-in progressive directionality.

he could have made his case for the cultural evolution of the idea of god quite nicely without confusing these two very different processes.

also, again, he contradicts himself by making such a strong case for “events on the ground” and non zero-sum situations as being the driving force behind the changes in how societies have perceived god — and then trying to link this to some “higher purpose.” he’s juggling apples and oranges here.

Members of society have a variety of conceptions about the nature of God…but it’s hards u to feel changes in society’s conceptions of God…especially on a day to day basis, let alone over a lifetime.
Most of our debate the nature of God roughly divides in public & private between the orthodox & non-orthodox views…which most often is dominated by the orthodox & conservative elements in a society. Non-orthodox or questioning of the nature viewed are deemed illegitimate & taboo.
This domination of society’s conceptions of God by the orthodox & conservative forces is what happened in the first three centuries after Jesus’s death, when the first Pope Constantine (who was also the Roman Emperor) chose the less state & empire chalenging interpretation of Jesus as the Son of God at the Nicene Council in the in the early 300’s.
From then on orthodox interpretation of God & Jesus enjoyed state support w/ all other interpretations being strictly forbidden.

Both this article and the book reviewed are pretty pallid stuff. It amazes me that people who dare to write on such an important topic assume they can do so intelligently with no knowledge of the history of philosophy, theology, and comparative religion. They apparently have not read Theosophy, which pioneered the notion of spiritual evolution through H. P. Blavatsky and her many disciples, nor Sri Aurobindo, who followed up this path brilliantly and was thoroughly acquainted with Darwinism, nor Teilhard de Chardin who attempted with great insight to reconcile scientific evolution with Christian understanding. This has not been a new subject for two hundred years; indeed Hegel in the time of Napoleon made human spiritual evolution the basis of his historical dialectic. It is sad that the pallid scientism of the current generation is unacquainted with all these rich texts which could color, extend, and enliven it (if not make it utterly pointless).

I’ll be looking forward to your book. (I’m waiting for the library to cough up Wright’s book.)

On the topic of evolution and morality, may I recommend a rewarding tangent? GB Shaw’s novella “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God” and his multi-play “Back to Methuselah”?

Shaw is often characterised as an atheist, but it’s more accurate to call him a mystic believing in a “life force” that began as a blind drive, gradually evolving toward greater intelligence and devising increasingly complex and sophisticated embodiments (that is, creatures). In that sense, his hypothesis collates well with Wright, De Waal, and Darwin (although GBS rejected Darwinism specifically for its lack of a moral purpose in evolution).

Granted, evolutionary biologists disdain Shaw, who based his work on Bergson’s “Creative Evolution,” for Shaw’s endorsement of Bergson’s belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics as well as for his belief in a higher power (however vague). But Shaw’s work is worth re-examining, not as a strictly literal explication of evolutionary mechanisms but as philosophical insight. (Plus, it’s witty and entertaining – and even 70 years later, some of the ideas in “Black Girl” and “Methuselah” would unsettle a great many readers.)

“Just because morality may have evolved in a direction we like to call progressive, that is no evidence of any higher purpose. Evolution has no purpose or goal – it’s one long improvisation.”

Evolution of living organisms or of moral codes may indeed have a purpose or goal. That of optimizing the efficient or maximal use of energy, for organisms, or for optimizing human interactions via effective reproduction, furthering the organisms goal, for moral codes. The change of moral codes over time, via feedback loops and selection pressures, to a higher level of objectively measurable complexity may indeed be the goal of evolutionary activity.

Moral evolution built into history? David Brooks wrote an article on this topic not too long ago. While I’m sure that Wright’s analysis is original, the concept he speaks of was neatly delineated by the philosopher Hegel and his concept of Geist–the historical spirit–described in his Philosophy of History. In his Hegelian dialectic, he describes history as moving in a three stage process that essentially opposes two ideas and calls for a third idea which reconciles the previous conflict. He describes the Indian caste system, the Chinese empires, and illustrates how the Germans were the first to recognize that all men are equal under God.

While some may argue that Hegel did not speak of an evolution, he actually describes moral evolution exactly as Wright appears to. Hegel references the earliest primitive man, saying this savage had an innate sense of religion, that was eventually perverted over time, with the introduction of the rational mind. However, Hegel shows how that as time goes on, religion forces its way into thought. Also see, believe it or not, St. Augustine and his description of a City of Man versus City of God. Same concept, in terms of a moral evolution.

I was talking to my almost 8 yr old about evolution this morning, and natural selection never came up. My main issue was energy; organisms take energy in and then they distribute it among maintenance, growth, and reproduction. If any trait takes too much energy away from those needs, the trait is going to be lost. If a trait doesn’t take too much energy, even if it doesn’t contribute at all to those needs, then it might be kept for a long time.

I agree. This idea of progression toward the “higher” is a common misapprehension about evolution. Publishers know they can sell any book with the words evolution and God in the title. That will only change as the public comes to understand evolution more thoroughly. If you like metaphors, it’s very fruitful to think of morality as evolving, but you have to be careful not to import your misapprehensions from biological evolution.

Early morality is directed only at the in-group; early God doesn’t mind if your tribe kills the “other” mercilessly. Probably the most dominant trend in the recent evolution of morality is the expansion of that in-group to include (at least nominally) all people in the notion of human rights. That’s obviously good in that individual freedoms allow people to live more autonomous and therefore potentially richer lives, and autonomy opens up cultural space to admit modern economic structures that generate wealth, allow leisure for education, and other wise support richness of life. But more autonomy for the individual comes at the cost of cultural structures that are sometimes very deeply rooted, sustaining, and painful to lose. Humans need some external cultural context in order to feel life is meaningful, and probably for their sanity. You have to ask generally how much autonomy is optimal for average individual happiness. Clearly the answer is neither “none” nor “as much as possible”. Anyway, we don’t have much control over these processes.

Complexity is increasing exponentially as has overall throughout human history. We solve old problems and we get new ones. The broad contours of the future are discernible (with probability) a decade or in some cases a century out, but I don’t think you can argue that perfection, or even a steady-state morality, is in store for us. I’d like to see more popular books explaining evolution concretely. Let’s master the concepts we have in the context for which they were developed before we start speculatively applying them in other domains.

God: A Biography is a very good book that deals with some of the same ideas in the context of the Hebrew God and the Bible.

Are we, humanity, on the threshold of finally getting a grip on our irrational impulses related to religion? Sadly, it seems we will likely do so sometime after we tackle global warming, drop creationism in its various guises, and abandon racist/tribal land grabs under self-legitimizing piety. We are still in trouble.

2. Today’s moral norms are “better” than those of ancient times… *when judged by today’s moral norms*. (Well, yeah. What would you expect?)

3. Therefore, God. Maybe. (Huh?)

1 is obvious. 2 is a tautology. 3 is a complete non sequitur.

Wright ought to apply for a job at the Discovery Institute; they seem to reason on about the same level, and to the same inevitable (but carefully hedged – no, no, we’re not saying God, we just think it’s *interesting* that our warped and contorted logic leads in that direction) conclusions.

Facinating, but raises questions of the existence of “humanity” itself. Did my by biomass (atoms, genes, ects.) type this comment or did “I” type this comment? If “I” is nothing more than a progression of irrational, amoral, natural and material processes then free will and personality is an illusion. The serial killer is nothing more than an organization of molecules in close proximity to a collection of metalic molecules which form an advance primate tool (knife) and through the forces of evolutionary plunges the knife into another biomass whom is known as a victim.

The day someone can put Logic, Reason, Time in a test tube then I might become a beliver. As it stands now I don’t have enough faith to ascribe attributes of deity to natural selection. Evolution simply is not big enough to displace God.

Religion is a conservative force in society. It opposes changes that would be tried because they would be “against the Bible” (or the Quran…). Society evolves and drags religion along with it, with religion kicking and screaming all along the way.

Animals have the instinct to herd together, support each other and sometimes even die for each other. Animals that support each other are more likely to survive and keep the genes that create that instinct. Early humans were controlled by instinct mostly rather than intellect but had the capacity to reason to a greater extend than animals and the basic instinct evolved to a moral code, the distinction between right and wrong.
The next evolutionary step in morality was religion. It provided an easy and simple point of reference when one wondered why one act was right and another wrong. The simple answer was that it was the will of god, of course.
Modern man, still driven mostly by instinct, is facing a world that changes fast, a world that advances technologically and to a smaller extend intellectually, a world full of questions but not enough answers. From the ancient Greeks to the present, man believes in god while at the same time questions the belief.
One day we may develop a philosophy that will allow humans to live better more fulfilling lives (first we have to figure out what “better” is) regardless of whether god is there or not, till then, the belief in god is essential to a society that wants to survive.
Just an opinion.

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John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. Now a columnist for the Science Times section, Tierney previously wrote columns for the Op-Ed page, the Metro section and the Times Magazine. Before that he covered science for magazines like Discover, Hippocrates and Science 86.

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